Interesting article but it doesn't really address the key issue. The reason government IT doesn't get tech right is not because they don't use Agile. The problem is much bigger than just switching to user stories.
"The president should use the power of the White House to end all large information technology purchases, and instead give his administration’s accomplished technologists the ability to work with agencies to make the right decisions, increase adoption of modern, incremental software development practices, like a popular one called Agile, already used in the private sector, and work with the Small Business Administration and the General Services Administration to make it easy for small businesses to contract with the government." > "use Agile"
Outsourcing a project that level of complexity is never going to end well. The only way to consistently produce good, highly complex software is to have stakeholders closely involved in every step of the process. You simply aren't going to get that level of involvement when you pass off development to contractors.
Ah, but the stakeholders, CMS on up to the White House, were "closely involved in every step of the process", e.g. CMS was the integrator (now replaced with contractor QSSI).
Unfortunately incompetent at that role/a bit too close, e.g. issuing change orders right through the week before launch, or ... well, I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader why they delayed doing their integration testing till 1, maybe 2 weeks before launch, and then ignored that the tests failed hard....
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 38.7 ms ] threadUnfortunately incompetent at that role/a bit too close, e.g. issuing change orders right through the week before launch, or ... well, I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader why they delayed doing their integration testing till 1, maybe 2 weeks before launch, and then ignored that the tests failed hard....